Addressing the topics of social inequity and economic disparity, Teach For America founder and director Wendy Kopp spoke to a capacity crowd at the Great Hall in Memorial Union on Wednesday night.
TFA provides low-income community public schools with teachers, recent college graduates who teach for two years at a time upon graduating from the program.
Kopp began by stating she was \speaking to share with you all why my colleagues and I feel a greater sense of urgency today than ever before,"" but first told the story of the founding of the organization.
She founded TFA in 1989 as a senior at Princeton University. An alumna of an affluent Dallas high school, Kopp described the similarly wealthy Dallas neighborhood she grew up in. Its residents had jokingly christened it ""The Bubble,"" she said, for its lack of diversity.
Kopp's original plan required $2.5 million in funding and at least 500 teachers. Hoping to secure federal funding, she wrote a letter to then-President George H. W. Bush. She joked that when she got a job rejection letter, she realized that it was not going to happen through the federal government.
Mobil Corporation then approved her for a seed grant, and 2,500 students responded in the first year. A small staff of recent college graduates picked 500 of those to be chapter corps members. The recruits were educated over an eight-week training session and deployed to six geographic areas that agreed to hire them.
Today, there are 9,000 TFA alumni, including 3,000 who are in the middle of their two-year teaching experience.
Despite such a response, Kopp is ambivalent about the program's larger success.
""On one level, much has been accomplished. On another, it's impossible to do this stuff and feel a sense of satisfaction with the system,"" she said. ""We shouldn't have a country where [this] is what it takes to achieve success for our kids.""
She proceeded to attack an institution that did not provide adequate leadership in every sector.
""Studies show that when kids in low-income communities are given resources they deserve, they excel,"" she said.
UW-Madison associate political science Professor Kathy Cramer-Walsh praised Kopp in her introduction to Kopp's speech.
""The truly inspiring part of this story is that she transformed this plan into reality,"" she said.
UW-Madison junior Jessica Drobka agreed.
""As someone interested in the program, I found it fascinating to hear about the background [of TFA] and how [Kopp] transformed it into what it is today,"" she said.
